First of all, Malhya is a reflection of my typical Kickstarter experience. I backed the game in March 2022. At that time, the delivery was estimated to happen in July 2023. Actual delivery: October 2025, over two years late. While this is at the high end of delays, I had far more games that were a year or two late than I had games that arrived on time. On the positive side, I didn't crowdfund a single board game yet which wasn't delivered at some point in time.

Even if a game is on time, the length of the crowdfunding process for a board game is at least a year. Delays just add to the problem that if you buy a board game way in advance, your needs might have changed by the time it is delivered. In March 2022, I was still living in a different city, and my gaming groups were regular groups on weekends, playing long sessions of role-playing games or board games that resemble those. Thus Malhya is such a long campaign game, where every player plays a hero in a series of narrative adventures, with a regular group and long sessions. In 2025, the majority of my board game activity is pickup groups for board game nights in which we play one-off board games within a 3-hour time window. I still have two regular weekend groups for long campaign games, meeting between once and twice per month. Which means that it takes us often over a year to finish a single campaign game. Malhya is thus just joining a long queue, where previous decisions to back campaign games have caused a considerable backlog of those games.

Having said that, Malhya is looking like it could be a fun campaign game, of medium complexity. The box is huge, it weighs over 11 kg, and there are tons of miniatures, cards, tiles, and other components. Compared to other crowdfunded games I have backed, this one is from a smaller team, and there is considerable less hype and less YouTube content for it. Some would say that this is the better type of crowdfunded board game, with a very enthusiastic team trying to make the best game they could, and failings being mostly due to inexperience in project management. As opposed to larger companies that have mastered the art of good-looking crowdfunding campaigns for mediocre games. I am looking forward to playing this, I'm just not sure it will happen anytime soon.